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How to Deal with Stress and be a Successful Weight-Controller

Psychologists have studied stress management for decades and know a great deal about those who are able to manage their weight successfully when faced with stressors.

Here are a few keys to success.

1. Develop Resilience
Resilient (or hardy) people not only avoid harm from stressors, they often flourish under this type of pressure. Psychologist Suzanne Kobasa's research indicates that hardy people exhibit the "three Cs": commitment, control and challenge. Those who are committed to their lives and work, who believe they can control their fate and who see stressors as positive challenges end up managing stress quite effectively.

Commitment
Commitment means giving it one's all, not just phoning it in. Many Wellspring campers and students exhibit remarkable levels of commitment from the very start.

Control
By reading this newsletter, you may be taking control of the problem you face as the parent of an overweight child.

Challenge
Many Wellspring parents understand they have a challenge on their hands. They keep looking for solutions until they find Wellspring. Their strategy is not simply to hope the problem will resolve itself. Nor do they give up, thinking it's hopeless.

Resilient weight controllers don't let setbacks or disappointments derail them. While many Wellspring campers and students used to give up on a new diet after gaining a few pounds, now, when problems arise after transitioning home, most of them will make sure to self-monitor, do more planning and take additional steps to increase activity. Successful weight-controllers don't stop looking at scales or looking at mirrors. They keep moving forward, committing to making a positive change in their lives and to looking at the many challenges of successful weight control as challenges, not stressors.

To become more resilient yourself and to help your young weight controller develop this approach, consider responding to stressors by asking questions that direct you to take charge. For example:

Try adding these questions to your lexicon at home. Talk in terms of challenges and opportunities rather than promoting complaints and problems in whiny and hopeless tones. In plain terms, it's making lemonade (sugar-free of course) out of lemons.

If you model this attitude for your child and reinforce it, you'll have laid a very positive foundation for managing stress.

2. Get Support from Friends & Family
It's well established that those with strong relationships suffer fewer medical and emotional problems than those who are more isolated. A study of 7,000 adults in California showed that people who lacked strong relationships with others died at a younger age than those who had strong relationships (i.e., married, frequent contacts with friends and neighbors or belonged to social clubs or religious groups).

Many other studies demonstrate that support from others can reduce the effects of stressors:

Simply put, we do better at almost anything when we're surrounded by people who actively show they care.

There are three ways of showing support: Emotional support, information and material support. You've undoubtedly used all of them to try help your weight controller.

Emotional Support
You provide emotional support when you:

Informational Support
You provide informational support when you:

Material Support
You provide material support to your child every day through

Because the support of friends and family can play such an important role in stress management, one great stress management skill is knowing when and whom to ask for help.

To whom does your child go for support? Does the support network include good listeners? Try to get your child thinking about identifying and taking full advantage of his or her support network.

For your part, try to look for signs of stress from your weight controller. Your child may start asking you to spend more time with him or her. If you ever feel annoyed about having to manage these requests for attention, think about responding positively to these requests like depositing money in a savings account. Providing support for your child can pay off down the road.

3. Use Stress Inoculation
University of Waterloo psychologist Dr. Don Meichenbaum has developed a useful approach for handling major stressors. Called stress inoculation, this technique builds "psychological antibodies" by preventing the attachment of problematic emotions like anger and anxiety to stressors. Stress inoculation includes an educational phase and a coping self-talk phase.

Education about the Stressor
In this phase of stress inoculation, fear of the unknown is abated with important information about the stressor. For example, children going to the dentist for the first time may not know what happens there. A friend may have told them that it hurts or that a big person in a white coat will yank out their teeth with a pair of pliers.

When facing a stressor, it's generally beneficial to try to understand it, read about it and take other steps to educate yourself about it.

Coping Self-Statements
We all talk to ourselves, at least sometimes. You may have done so when you took your first dive off of a diving board or made your first public speech. Perhaps you made self-statements like "C'mon, you can do it," or "Go for it." Research shows that such self-statements are actually quite helpful when facing challenges of all kinds.

Psychologists advise people facing such challenges to use four types of self-statements: preparing for the stressor, confronting and handling the stressor, coping with feelings at critical moments and rewarding oneself for successful coping.

Here are examples of these four types of self-statements that can be used to manage almost any stressor. By using these self-statements, your child can begin to actively cope with stressors and become more hardy and resilient. Consider asking your weight controller to pick a stressor and work through these self-statements with you.

Self-Statements when Preparing for a Stressor

Self-Statements when Confronting and Handling the Stressor Self-Statements when Coping with Feelings at Critical Moments Self-Statements when Rewarding Yourself for Successful Coping

Weight controllers face many stressors that can directly impact weight control. Consider your standard holiday party. Holiday parties typically include lots of high-fat foods and a generally relaxed and unrestrained state. How could your weight controller use the stress inoculation approach to handle this stressor?

First, your child would learn as much as possible about the event:

The answers to these questions determine the severity of the stressor. The party can be easily managed if low-fat options abound and if socializing provides a good distraction. On the other hand, a boring party combined with abundant high-fat food may require a higher level of coping skills.

Coping self-statements can help get your child through challenges like this. Try some of the following:

Preparing

Confronting and handling

Coping at critical moments

Rewarding myself for success

4. Cued Relaxation
Cued relaxation is a way of including relaxation in everyday life by using cues found in everyday life to remind oneself to take a brief relaxation break. Such cues can include a ringing cell phone, drinking water, reaching for a wallet, brushing hair or applying make-up. When the cue occurs, take a few seconds to use a relaxation technique.

Here are a few examples.

Cue = Ringing cell phone

  1. Cell phone rings
  2. Answer phone
  3. Use a breathing technique (e.g., slow rhythmic breathing)
  4. During the call focus on breathing in a relaxed manner
  5. After the call, take another few seconds to execute the relaxation technique once again.

Cue = Drinking Water or Diet Soda

  1. Begin drinking
  2. Focus on the fluid and the sounds and sights of it
    •What color is it?
    •What specifically does it sound like as you drink?
    •Concentrate on the texture of the fluid as it enters your mouth and goes down your throat.
  3. Create a vivid image that involves water. For example:
    •You are on a beach in the summertime and you are watching a lake gently flow to the shore and retreat from the shore.
    •You are hiking on a mountain and you come upon a beautiful waterfall. You are watching the water flow and beat down on the rocks below. You are listening to the sounds and smelling the air.
  4. Take a few minutes to stay in the image, keeping it vivid, using all of your senses to enliven the imagery.

Cue = Reaching for Your Wallet

  1. After your hand makes contact with the wallet, remind yourself to relax.
  2. Tense and then relax some of the muscles in your hand and arm. Tense and relax those muscles at least twice.
  3. Pay attention to the change in sensation from the tense to the relaxed state for each muscle group that you use. Focus on the relaxed state for a few seconds and try to bring that sense of relaxation from the top of your head through your eyes and down to the rest of your body.